Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @03:51PM
from the retirement!-retirement!-retirement! dept.

jones_supa writes: After leaving his position as CEO of Microsoft a year ago, Steve Ballmer has still held a position as a member of the board of directors for the company. Now, he is leaving the board, explaining why in a letter to fresh Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "I have become very busy," Ballmer explains. "I see a combination of Clippers, civic contribution, teaching and study taking up a lot of time." Despite his departure, the former-CEO is still invested in the company's success, and he spent most of the letter encouraging Nadella and giving advice. Nadella shot back a supportive, equally optimistic response, promising that Microsoft will thrive in "the mobile-first, cloud-first world."

They're already the second largest Iaas provider after Amazon (EC2 vs Azure) and the second largest business Saas provider after Salesforce (SF vs Office365/Dynamics cloud). As they cloudify more of their offerings they'll be able to capture plenty of revenue from mobile, and since they'll actually be eating their own dogfood their tools for large customers should get better and more and more small customers will just host with them.

So people that shit on others, circumvent and break the law, and basically shit on people at every possible opportunity to make personal gains are to be looked up to when they toss a crumb to a crowd. Got it.

Grats on being a completely brainwashed idiot, instead of just an average idiot.

I sincerely feel that microsoft stock is very high and is unsustainable over a long period. I cannot sell my stock while still on microsoft board. By leaving the board, I will be able to sell the stock before it crashes. Why do you think, I made you CEO in the first place?

It should be pretty obvious that this point that mobile isn't all that it's cracked up to be, even if executives need to at least pretend in public that it's still relevant, to save face.

Smartphones haven't moved much beyond text messaging (or apps that offer similar functionality), email, games, and basic web browsing. Many corporate users just use them for email and occasional phone calls. There's really nothing to be monetized there.

Netbooks have proven to be an abysmal failure. Customers just don't want the bad experience that they provide, when it comes to both software and hardware. We haven't seen any real adoption of Chromebook-style devices, either, for the same reason.

Tablets have also failed in the market. Apple is the only vendor to have seen some success, but that was built more upon hype and the quasi-religious attitude that many people hold toward Apple devices, rather than out of any real need or use for such devices. Outside of a small number of niche use cases, people in general have found tablets to be useless. They sound good in theory, but then they're found to be too locked down or inconvenient to use, and end up collecting dust.

People want desktops. People want real laptops. People don't want yet another shitty mobile device. I'm sorry to say this, but you and your friends were in the wrong field. You followed fads rather than providing real value, and paid for it with your jobs. Resources need to go where they'll be best used, and mobile just isn't the best use for them.

This sums up the core MS issue better than anything else I've ever read. MS has never been innovative, but worse: It has never been a company that likes change. Their world-view is static and stationary. While they acknowledge the world is changing (reality can be quite persuasive), they don't see movement, they see a succession of stationary status quos.

They will now throw everything at becoming the perfect company for the picture of the world they have. And in five years look out the window and see that the world has changed - again.

It's also the reason we all hate MS - due to their still existing stranglehold on computing, they keep much of the rest of the world static with them. The damage done by preventing innovation and progress is easily ten times MS net worth.